“When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just when and what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.” (With apologies to Lewis Carroll.)
George Rebane
We talk past each other because we share no common logic, reasoning, history, facts, …, and yes, no common semantics. One side demands to know what words mean during a dialogue or debate, the other side wants to avoid such revelations at all costs. This has been clear since at least the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, because for the Left history is in a constant state of political and ideological revision. The role of any given word today may have to change markedly tomorrow when responding to unforeseen events or opportunities.
We recognize socialism as one of the prominent limbs of collectivism, a form of that overarching ideology that readily can morph into communism or one of many less-formalized forms of totalitarianism. The common denominator of all these is that the individual derives value only to the extent that he succumbs to and supports the regime in power, all others are cast into various groups of traitors, seditionists, insurrectionists, and other repressed kinds of ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Today in America we see and already experience harbingers of such class categorizations by the ascendant Left and their lamestream media.
As examples, none on the Left can or will give the public any stable or even conditionally stable definitions of their workaday pejoratives like ‘racist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘fascist’, ‘deplorables’, ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’, … , and terms such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white nationalism’, ‘equality’, ‘equity’, ‘racial preference’, … , and of course ‘sedition’ and ‘insurrection’.
Such use of slippery semantics by the Left occurs at all levels of our society ranging from the federal government all the way down to our local leftwing worthies who comment on RR. Examples of these abound. On one end, we refer you to today’s attempt by Biden to end-run Congress on gun control and the Second Amendment collected under the undefined rubric of ‘gun violence’. Any reasonable view of his “six initial actions” (here) reveals that nowhere does he define or point to definitions of such key terms as ‘ghost guns’ and ‘assault weapon’, or the scope of his proposed nationalized ‘red flag’ law. Everyone on both sides knows that the objective here is to enable another major ratchet on restricting the constructive use and ownership of firearms, therefore definitions always need to be malleable.
On the local level a leftwing worthy continues to echo (here) the Left’s Big Lie that the 6jan21 storming of the Capitol, enabled by an incompetently led and permissive cadre of Capitol Police, was an “insurrection”. I countered with my habitual attempt to uncover the Left’s pernicious use of language by citing the classical definition of insurrection. (See also the RR ‘Glossary & Semantics’ and ‘A Conservetarian Credo’.) The only response that our leftwinger could muster was to accuse me of hiding behind semantics, the correct use of the English language – to wit, “… semantics, the weakest of all responses to be used only when you have nothing else to say.” There was no need for anyone to say anything more in that case than to point out the man’s egregious use of language. Yet, at a loss for a wider access to vocabulary, he then demanded what I would call the 6jan21 event at the Capitol.
Well, since there was no evidence whatsoever of any preparation or execution of actions to overturn our sitting government and replace it with one waiting in the wings, I would call the penetration of the building a spontaneous civil disobedience, a mob action, or even a directionless and chaotic riot by a frustrated crowd. To confirm this, the investigations launched in response have not been able to find evidence for anything more sinister and/or organized that occurred on that day. Yet it was an event which daily our Democrats still attempt to inflame and divide Americans by equating it to the 7dec41 and 11sep01 ‘days of infamy’. Here we see one more subversion of semantics by the Left, as they broadcast propaganda at its best and most effectively against intellectually defenseless people burdened by being educated in progressive public schools.
